GAMSAT online platform demo: a rehearsal checklist, not practice

Treat the GAMSAT online platform demo as a software rehearsal, not as another practice test. ACER (the Australian Council for Educational Research) states on its preparation page that the demo exists so candidates can learn the computer delivery platform used in all test centres, and that supplying extra practice questions is not its job. ACER also encourages candidates to try it, so they know how the software works and what to expect when they sit.

What ACER says the demo is, and what it is not

Open your ACER account and choose "Manage" beside your registration to reach the demo. Three other facts from ACER's page matter for how you use it. The demo questions are taken from ACER's Practice Questions publication. None of the questions or essays in the demo are marked. And you can open the demo as often as you like.

Each of those points toward the same use. Because nothing is marked, a run through the demo produces no result, so any number you assigned yourself would be a guess presented as a score. It cannot predict anything, because it measures nothing. The second consequence is about protecting material you may want to keep clean. If the demo items come from the Practice Questions publication, then answering them seriously in the demo means you have met those items before you work through the publication itself. A later attempt at them is then no longer a fresh one. Keeping the demo for the software leaves the official practice questions available for the job they were written to do.

A rehearsal checklist

ACER's page does not describe the platform's controls, so the list below is our proposal rather than ACER's. It is built from what ACER advises candidates to do during the sitting and from what it says about timing and writing. Check each item against what the demo actually shows you, and do not assume a feature exists because the list mentions the task.

• Moving between items. Go forward through a run of questions, then back to an earlier one, until you can do it without searching for the control.
• Marking for a return visit. ACER advises that if you think you know an answer, you mark it, move on and come back later if time allows, and it adds that a wrong answer costs no marks and that every question carries the same value. Find out how the demo lets you mark a question and how you can tell which ones you have marked. The ACER page does not say how the platform does this, so the demo is where you find out.
• Getting back to marked questions. Mark several, move well past them, then return. The check is whether you can reach the ones you wanted without scrolling blindly through the rest.
• Knowing the time without a prompt. The demo page does not say whether the demo shows a timer. On Written Communication, ACER says the on-screen timer in its timed online practice mirrors remote proctored sittings, and that test-centre sittings show no timer, with timing announced by a supervisor. If you have grown used to a visible countdown in practice, notice that dependence now.
• Typing comfort. The demo includes essays, so you can type a response in the platform itself. ACER states that spelling and punctuation errors do not affect Written Communication scores, so what is worth checking is whether typing and editing feel comfortable, not whether the text is tidy.
• A friction log. Write down every moment you stopped to hunt for something. Each entry is a small problem you can settle now, at no cost to your marks.

Rehearsal works here because it moves the discovery to a time when nothing is at stake. Finding that you cannot locate your marked questions is a minor annoyance in the demo. In a timed section the same discovery costs time you have already committed to other questions.

When to use it, given unlimited access

Since there is no cap on how often you can open the demo, one visit is not the plan. A first pass can be purely exploratory: look around, click things, work out what the controls are. A later pass, closer to your sitting, can run the checklist deliberately and confirm that the friction log is empty.

Doing at least one pass before your timed practice has a specific benefit. If the interface slows you during a timed set and you have never rehearsed it, the lost time cannot be separated from time lost to reasoning. Rehearsing first removes one possible explanation. This article is only about the software. Rules on working materials are a separate question, and for scratch paper in particular the place to start is ACER's booklet, as covered in our guide to scratch paper and whiteboard strategy.

What the demo cannot do

The demo cannot tell you how well you reason, how fast you work, or what you would score, because it marks nothing. Beyond saying that its questions and essays come from the Practice Questions publication, ACER's page does not describe what the demo contains or how closely every on-screen behaviour matches the sitting, so we make no claim about either. And comfort with the interface says nothing about how well you answer. It only clears a path so that the reasoning is the thing being tested.

Once the interface has stopped being a suspect, a practice set that still runs slowly or goes wrong leaves a question the demo cannot answer: whether the cause was how you reasoned. Verantrix can record how you reasoned through a question, not only which option you chose, which gives you something to read beyond the result. On your next timed set, note each point where you slowed down and whether the cause was a control you had to search for or a decision you could not settle.